Wintel Benchmark on IBM Servers Shatters TPC-C Record

A performance cluster of 32 servers running Windows 2000 on
IBM Corp.’s database software and servers more than tripled the benchmark records
of the leading Unix/RISC systems.

IBM Corp. (www.ibm.com)
today announced the OLTP benchmark on the Transaction Processing Performance
Council (www.tpc.org) TPC-C benchmark. The
systems combined to achieve 440,879 transactions per minute (tpmC) at a cost
per transaction of $32.28.

Brian Sanders, worldwide brand director for IBM’s Netfinity
line of servers, used a jet analogy to compare the system to a Unix system from
Sun Microsystems Inc. that got about 135,000 transactions for about $97 per
transaction.

“We just built a jet plane that goes three times faster than
the old jet but burns one third the fuel,” Sanders said.

Microsoft Corp. helped IBM design the system. Michel
Gambier, group product manager of enterprise server marketing at Microsoft (www.microsoft.com) called the benchmark
further validation of the scalability of Windows 2000. Gambier said the
transaction rate would support 1.4 billion transactions per day. By comparison,
Visa processes 25 billion transactions per year.

“That gives you an idea of the type of headroom you’ve got
in that system,” Gambier said.

What IBM says about the Sun Solaris/Oracle systems, of
course, also applies to IBM’s own Unix-based RS/6000 systems. IBM currently
owns the TPC-C single-system raw performance lead with a 24-processor RS/6000
system (135,815 tpmC at $52.70/tpmC).

“There are a lot of other criteria that go into choosing a
system – what you’re used to administering, where your applications come from,”
Sanders said. “I think what this [benchmark] says is the industry standard
server platform can now scale up.”